Music, Copyright, and "The Right to Tinker"

When I first read about the idea of "the right to tinker," the first thing I thought of was music, YouTube, and the many, many fantastic covers of well-known songs that exist on there.

Now as I started thinking about some of my favorite artists and covers, I began to wonder, how is this possible? While it seems like my favorite YouTube cover artists are fairly informal and probably not paying royalties or even writing to ask permission to cover these popular songs, their covers are not only popular and continuing to exist, but these covers are also being sold and can be found on sites like iTunes and Pandora radio. 

So how does that work? I had no idea. So I ventured off to see my good friend Google and what I could dig up on music copyright.

Now after reading a bunch of complicated copyright gobbledygook, I'm still not entirely positive I have this correct. However, there seems to be various music licenses that can be gained for covering music, such as a mechanical license. But what it all seems to boil down to is that if you wanted to make and sell a cover of a popular song, there is technically no one that can stop you, as long as you paid a certain amount of royalties to the copyright owner. This is under what is known as a compulsory license. While the original song's copyright owner does still own the song and you do have to pay royalties to that song owner, they have no power to stop you from making a cover.

However, according to a recent lawsuit against one of YouTube's largest video suppliers, a group of well-known music publishers are complaining that many of these amateur artists, likely including the ones I watch, do not pay the proper royalties, and these companies are demanding their proper dues. 

Yet, it seems that many of the artists who performed the original songs being covered are not only unmoved by their work being covered without royalties, but will even give support to the covering artists. For example, famous composer Eric Whitacre will often compliment and post links to fan-made covers of his own music on his twitter account and popular musician Justin Bieber, who famously started his career because of his own YouTube covers, says that he thinks it's awesome when people post covers of his songs. It seems that often the music publishing companies care more about the copyrights and royalties than the actual artists.

The point I'm trying to get at though, is that shouldn't these amateur musicians have the "right to tinker," without having to worry about copyright and royalties? Now the question of royalties and copyright is a tricky one, and I'm not going to pretend I have an answer to the question that has bothered many since the dawn of the digital age. However, I do think that we should loosen the grasp of copyright on musicians, rather than tighten it, so that we can create an age of collaborative music.

 I see this case of royalty-less cover songs as something similar case to Japan's doujinshi: while technically against the law, leaving cover artists their "right to tinker" could potentially be beneficial to the artists, the listening public, and arguably to the music industry as a whole, for many reasons, such as:

• Allowing music artists the right to tinker allows musicians to create an incredibly broad music spectrum -- even for a single song. A single song can also be changed drastically, mashed up creatively with other published music, or even generally improved through the power of leaving artists their "right to tinker" with published music.
•   As a listener, I've often been in the shoes of "well, I really like the original song...just not so wild about the original style and/or artist." By continuing to allow artists to make their own versions of known songs allows listeners like me to be able to search and find a cover that is more suited to my personal tastes.
• Letting musicians start their careers with cover songs can allow talented new artists to get more notice than by only through doing original work. By covering a well-known song and posting it to somewhere like YouTube, an artist has a better chance of being discovered, since that song will already have a larger listening audience (for example, I found one of my now favorite groups by searching for covers of the Coldplay song "Paradise.") 
• More artists = more income for the music industry. While they may not be getting paid their technical dues at the moment from cover songs, if these artists end up getting well known enough where they might seek joining a record label, then that income will be returned eventually through that artist's official albums.

 Yes, all of these things could still be possible if we left the current licenses and royalty laws in place. However, I feel that if we work to crack down harder on these current, often ignored, clauses, we might discourage up-and-coming artists from coming up with their sometimes brilliant interpretations of already published music, and that if we discourage these artists, the music industry would suffer quite a loss of potential talent.

To finish up my post (and to make it up to you for forcing yourself to make it through my fevered, possibly nonsense, ramblings), let me recommend some of my favorite covers to demonstrate how talented these artists can be, and what we can lose if we crack down on these artists for their creativity:

Paradise/Peponi by The Piano Guys (Original by Coldplay)
Can't Hold Us by Pentatonix (Original by Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis)
Born this Way by Peter Hollens (Original by Lady Gaga)
Fireflies by Sungha Jung (Original by Owl City)
Gentleman by Tyler Ward (Original by Psy)
Halo Theme by Lindsey Stirling (Original Track)

Many of these artists have original work too, while others stick mainly to covers, but in any case, they all have quite a bit of musical talent. I feel that many of these artists, despite their talent and current popularity on YouTube, would have remained largely undiscovered if it weren't for their covers. That's why I feel like we would be losing something potentially great if we start to crack down on copyright, and take away a musicians "right to tinker" with published music.

(Sorry guys, I seriously had no idea this post was going to wind up so long. ^^; I'll try to work on that whole "concise" thing throughout the semester.)